leadership development

Currently, we’re piloting a 14-week immersion program that focuses on an inspirational theme we knew would generate interest. Participants meet for 3.5 hours each Tuesday, with an all-day trip to neighboring institutions on the first Tuesday of each month. During the first half of the semester, the participants hear from on- and off-campus leaders to learn more about the university and its peer institutions. During the second half, they will explore a team project and ultimately deliver a presentation of their findings to the president and provost. Whereas the program’s specific theme is new, and whereas some of the participant makeup is new, the program’s general format parallels many of our other immersion programs’.

Regardless of the type of program, an immersion experience can accelerate the development of people’s leadership skills. Leadership skills benefit every individual, as well as the institution or community as a whole, irrespective of the person’s official position. People with leadership skills achieve more, develop a greater sense of purpose, and improve organizational or community health.

The very structure of an immersion program fosters those skills. Like most of our others, this pilot program challenges participants’ time-management skills in order to build their capacities for new initiatives, raises their institutional awareness, and organizes sustained engagements with diverse perspectives — not only to develop participants’ critical-thinking skills and diversify their problem-solving techniques, but also to encourage institutional thinking over departmental thinking.

Projects dramatically improve immersion programs. A project can help participants not only develop their teamwork skills, but also comprehend the value of collaborating with stakeholders and cultivating champions for the cause. Whereas everyone appears to understand the importance of buy-in, few demonstrate knowledge of how to cultivate it. The early, uncertain stages of our projects include structured conversations and brainstorming sessions with stakeholders, while the participants try to better understand and accommodate the stakeholders’ needs. This investigative process elevates stakeholder awareness of unmet needs. It also invites them to help shape the end result. Both of those aspects often generate champions for the cause. Behind the scenes, the champions then raise more awareness, and particularly if they come from diverse constituencies, they broaden buy-in. Without a project and structured reflection on the process, even immersion programs would have trouble raising awareness of how to generate buy-in.

Perhaps most importantly, immersion programs foster close friendships. Close friendships can lead to sustainable networks for increased knowledge-sharing, collaborations, and potentially even resource-sharing. Connectivity creates an adaptable and resourceful institution or community, capable of responding rapidly to threats and seizing timely opportunities. In fact, friendships succeed where reporting structures and other forced networks fail. Their tangential conversations can blossom into innovations, and intimacy can increase collaborators’ personal investments. That level of friendship necessitates not only ice-breakers, a “Vegas” environment, structured peer interactions, and scheduled time for group reflection, but also topic flexibility to accommodate tangential and idle conversations.

After last week’s day trip, a participant related how much she values our bus rides. The bus rides have helped her, in her words, “really get to know” some of her colleagues. She claimed their new-found friendships already have seeded potential collaborations. Bear in mind, she and her colleagues do not merely desire to maintain their relationships. They better comprehend each others’ needs, skills, and resources, as well as how they fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

That comprehension improves organizational culture and effectiveness, and well-structured immersion programs can not only replicate that comprehension. Well-structured immersion programs can scale it.

Here are fifteen suggestions for developing a successful immersion program:

3. Further raise the program’s profile by outsourcing the participant-selection process to a committee.

4. Coach the selection committee to choose participants based on their diverse backgrounds, experiences, access to resources, …. In other words, select to create the best program experience. Selection is part of the design.

5. Schedule the program to meet routinely for multiple hours at a time; more frequent meetings can require fewer hours for fewer weeks, but less frequent meetings demand more consecutive hours for additional months.

6. Create a relevant ice-breaker activity.

7. Incorporate a relevant team project into the experience.

8. Craft a project charge that is broad enough to encourage team ownership but specific enough to provide structure.

9. Consider reserving a day for participants to shadow relevant but diverse colleagues, community members, or professionals.

Here at the Center for Teaching and Learning, we have been socially networking the university in order to create a more adaptable institution, capable of rapid changes. By bridging the silos of academic departments and colleges, we thus far have facilitated not only the development of new ideas but also actual changes to the university’s organizational chart and processes. We’re becoming a stronger institution in the face of unprecedented technological, economic, and social changes.

In the spring, we will start bridging the gap between faculty and staff, and ideally, we’ll expand this framework to better connect the university’s employees with the surrounding community — the latter’s goal being to facilitate mutual sustainability and growth — and then with other TBR institutions to diversify the available problem-solving skills and overall knowledge and other resources.

But I had missed an additional component that’s structurally necessary for this vision.

Change-leadership scholar John P. Kotter (2014) suggests an additional component in the facilitation of rapid changes. Kotter argues for a dual organizational system, which our Center already facilitates minus a key ingredient. Counterbalancing the university’s hierarchical bureaucracy, a network of passionate people in Kotter’s ideal organization explores threats or opportunities and promotes rapid changes that the hierarchy otherwise cannot address in time. Here at Austin Peay, our Center’s cohort programs network people from across the organization who feel a sense of urgency and want to be change agents. But after they help communicate the change vision, if the administration cannot merely implement the change — as it could, for instance, in the relocation of our Career Services from Academic Affairs to Student Affairs — then the change initiative gets redirected to a taskforce within the very same bureaucratic organization. In other words, the bureaucracy recaptures it and deprives it of its momentum.

The solution? A facilitated (not chaired) guiding coalition.

Like a taskforce, the guiding coalition would further research what is already being done here and at peer institutions, what has been done here and at peer institutions, costs, available resources, … but it also would have design-school-esque facilitated discussions to “[identify] and [remove] barriers which slow or stop [this] strategically important activity” (Kotter, 2014, p. 32). That last part is what a taskforce cannot achieve.

This extra component to Kotter’s dual organizational system will enable us to oversee not only idea generation, but also, at least in certain instances, implementation. For a stronger Austin Peay. For a stronger community. For a stronger higher educational system.

Higher education faces daunting challenges. It struggles to meet the demands of an economic crisis in which people need jobs and employers want higher-quality job candidates. Our computer-infused work environment requires greater technological, visual-thinking, and critical-thinking skills for even entry-level jobs. Globalization necessitates not only enhanced critical thinking, but correspondingly, the capacity for sustained engagements with ideological and cultural differences. Also, both citizenry and a growing number of work environments require the skills to navigate an increasingly rhetoric- and statistics-based world. In the face of rising student debt, students and their parents, legislators, and potential employers, however, now question the value of higher education. They most overtly question degrees in the humanities — which foster many of those skills, only without a clear career path. This conflict has resulted in new entrants in the market who then compete with at least the public colleges and universities, which have had to raise tuition to replace diminishing state funds.

This conflict reinforces the ongoing transformation of faculty in the university system. Especially to circumvent administrative bloat and its costs, faculty have had to harbor more and more administrative responsibilities, part of a growing trend of reframing faculty as academic professionals with a growing number of non-teaching responsibilities. These responsibilities demand a new social architecture, and we can achieve it only through innovative professional development.

Social architecture has two goals: distribute responsibilities and “integrate diverse efforts in pursuit of common goals” (Bolman & Deal, 2013, p. 44). The social architecture of higher education effectively distributes responsibilities, but it also creates silos. In fact, the extreme specialization by which higher education distributes responsibilities also creates the silos. Compounding this problem, a myth of solitary genius betrays reality: knowledge and innovation are not individual pursuits, but rather the result of collective practices. Extreme specialization and its resulting isolation permeate the culture of higher education and impede integrative initiatives that can facilitate common goals. To meet the demands of today’s challenges, the social architecture of higher education needs reform.

Far too often, however, university representatives confine collaborations to a single division, like Academic Affairs, rather than explore collaborative opportunities between university divisions or with community partners. Pedagogically, many faculty look only to each other, particularly within their own departments, for collaborators. For new initiatives, some turn solely to their chairs, deans, or the provost for funding. In the end, stretched human and financial resources limit success.

Campus stakeholders reside in all university divisions. Student Affairs houses an array of departments that focus on developing student capacities for time- and stress-management, personal health and wellbeing, diversity awareness and appreciation, civic engagement, global citizenry, teamwork, and leadership. Under the direction of Human Resources, student employment can expand the range of immediate stakeholders for student development and success to the entire university.

The call for collaborations between university divisions is not new. At least since George D. Kuh’s 1994 keynote, “The Student Learning Imperative: Implications for Student Affairs,” student-affairs professionals have called for student- and academic-affairs collaborations that can produce what Kuh (March/April, 1996) calls “seamless learning environments” (p. 135). The term refers to curricular and co-curricular learning objectives working in tandem to overcome an otherwise fragmented learning process in order to foster lifelong learning.

The more faculty and staff interact, the better they can get to know each other, overcome inter-departmental or -divisional communication barriers and misunderstandings, foster a greater sense of campus community, collaborate, share knowledge and resources, innovate …. With shared imagination and support, a university’s faculty and staff can accomplish anything.

But partnerships and collaborations have to extend beyond the campus. The surrounding community also has a stake. The educational attainment of local citizenry can attract national employers, raise the competitiveness of local businesses, increase local tax revenue, improve community problem-solving skills, and in general expand both the pool and circulation of available resources. Imaginative administrators, faculty, and staff can identify and raise the awareness of potential stakeholders, collaborate with them, harness their vision, and empower, motivate, and mobilize community champions for student success.

Each university digs deep channels into the community that ferry students, workers, funding, and other resources back and forth for mutual sustainability and growth. Service-learning has enabled universities to formally explore, beyond internships, how to expand educational oversight and credit to community practices, but that and other integrative concepts need greater exploration. The university system’s further integration with the community can only benefit both it and the community.

Even to develop the skills and venues for partnerships, collaborations, and intentional explorations, faculty and staff and even community partners need innovative professional development. Differences in reward systems, norms for communications, reporting and authorization structures, and organizational objectives can convolute the incentives, decision-making process, documentation and assessment process, and expectations. Research indicates, on the one hand, that obligatory partnerships do not last past their mandates; on the other hand, partnerships that spring organically from pre-existing relationships foster mutual understanding, shared expectations, and more sustainable practices (Eddy, 2010, p. 21). After those human relationships yield collaborations, offices or personnel who maintain relationships with partnering organizations can nurture them and develop organizational bridges. But the human element has to happen first.

Here at Austin Peay State University, the Faculty Leadership Program (FLP) fosters campus interactions that can lead to student, faculty, and institutional success, and we’re expanding its framework to integrate faculty and staff through a Women’s Leadership Program (WLP). Unlike other universities’ leadership-development opportunities, the FLP and WLP do not cater to administrators. They do not support “leadership” as an official position. Nor do they promote campus success as a managerial responsibility.

Instead, the FLP and WLP promote leadership from the ranks. Adrianna Kezar (2001) reminds us that anyone, regardless of position, can serve as a change agent (p. 7). Through wide and deep personal networks, any individual can draw from diverse resources and knowledge to solve problems and develop campus innovations (Eddy, 2010, p. 29). At very least, a person can serve as a “node to connect disparate networks” (p. 64) in problem-solving and innovation.

Wide and deep personal networks expand personal awareness and influence. Diverse relationships enhance a person’s “cognitive flexibility” in an academically and operationally complex environment (p. 30). Close relationships improve that person’s influence in leveraging changes. A campus of change agents has the power to transform and strengthen the university, but it demands heightened faculty and staff awareness and interconnectivity.

Leadership from the ranks also responds more effectively than administrative managerialism does to external calls for change. Faculty and staff agency enables the “flexibility and adaptability that are particularly important in meeting external demands” (Kezar et al., 2006, p. 111), like those imposed by disruptive technologies, changes to the state funding formula, rising tuition during an economic downturn, social calls for increased accountability, decreased availability of state and federal grants, and the increased role of private donors, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Educause, Complete College America, educational entrepreneurs …. The current climate demands heightened individual awareness and collective adaptability.

So long as state contributions fail to meet budgetary shortfalls, let alone continue to shrink, the public university system will need dynamic faculty and staff who can lead rapid changes in response to powerful external pressures, particularly those tied to monetary incentives. In an environment where only consistent, large-scale change initiatives can attract the funding for even essential university operations, strong faculty and staff leadership can shield students from harmful trends while developing and implementing bold practices that truly lead to student, institutional, and community success.

For future leadership programs, I’ve been researching negotiation strategies. As I read through the literature, I realize that most of our negotiations have nothing to do with salaries, the purchases of cars, or the release of hostages. Our daily negotiations transpire between colleagues or loved ones. They occur in committees, teamwork, or familial decisions, and they demand that we protect the relationship.

They also are the sources of our future opportunities and voice.

Many negotiation tactics elevate the participants’ roles. They portray negotiators as opponents. Some legitimize theatrics, deceit. Even if everyone reaches satisfactory agreement, people still refer to outcomes as wins and losses.

Because negotiations enable essential university operations, group choices, and familial decisions, and because only a minority thrives in stressful negotiations, perhaps we have a moral obligation to rethink at least daily negotiations as collaborations. If we and our partners at the table do not see eye-to-eye, even on being collaborators, we still can reframe the discussion—and without “losing” our voice or opportunities to someone else’s cleverness or aggression.

Strategically, all we have to do is downplay the role of the participants and raise the visibility of the various factors that impact the decision-making process.

How do we accomplish that? First and foremost, we have to clearly connect our position to the needs of others: our families, the students, our colleagues, the department, our divisions, the institution …. This connection will empower us—not only in the eyes of others, but equally importantly, in our own eyes. Ironically, it empowers by removing you. It removes you as the sole benefactor and therefore implied subject of discussion.

Since we’re removing the participants as focal points, we never have to feign an emotion. We never have to stage theatrics. And we need only one prop.

That prop is paper. Particularly if the discussion gets aggressive, paper enables us to redirect the focus from each other to the paper, which is where we will write the facts—not as leverage, but rather as necessary components for problem-solving. The paper keeps us honest. Also, focusing on facts for problem-solving can help everyone escape from interfering emotions. If possible, move your chair next to your partner across the table, so the proximity encourages intimacy and you two have to look occasionally at the paper instead of each other.

Those are the easy tactics. The rest involves reflection, research, active listening, and targeted questioning. Use those skills to investigate your side, their side, and external factors, because the more you know, share, listen, and question during the discussion, the better you can collaborate.

If you know your own principles, needs, concerns, and goals, and if you’re willing to acknowledge and overcome your preconceptions during the collaboration process, then specificities do not matter. In collaborative negotiation, you’re not aiming for a specific package. You’re using bundled options as illustrative starting points for collaboratively exploring how to satisfy principles, meet needs, circumvent concerns, and accomplish goals. If possible, bring multiple packaged options to the table as conversation starters.

Both prior and during negotiation, if you can determine your partner’s principles, needs, concerns, goals, and preconceptions, then you can significantly impact if not dictate the terms of agreement—especially if you openly and transparently subordinate all options to them. This isn’t about control. It’s about motivating and building trust.

Both prior and during negotiation, if you can determine the external factors that might positively or negatively impact the deal, then you can focus the meeting on seizing opportunities or problem-solving. What is the status of traditional funding sources? What are the collaborative or alternative funding opportunities? Whose presence or contributions in the planning phase might expedite the process or expand the available knowledge, technology, workers, funds, or other resources? Which policies might affect the agreement’s language or action steps? Whose buy-in do you need, and how can you give them a voice in the process?

The remaining quadrant represents the collaborative exploration, reevaluation, brainstorming, and problem-solving of the other three. It represents the meeting space that can shed new light on your reflection and research, new light that can yield new opportunities.

This space demands four skills: sharing skills, active-listening skills, questioning skills, and the ability to build on what others say. How well can you connect the discussion to your stakeholders, principles, needs, concerns, and goals? Can you consistently repeat—or better, rephrase—your partner’s position and points, including inferences you make from body language, in order to verify you understood and demonstrate your attentiveness? Can you ask follow-up or other questions to learn more about your partner’s principles, needs, concerns, goals, or preconceptions? Rather than emphasize points of objection, can you build on possible points of interest?

Collaboration appears to be a subset of negotiation, but it’s the main platform for effective university operations, productive human interactions, and campus innovations. When we work against each other, campus community gives way to disgruntled individualism. When we work together, we create new opportunities for everyone.

Yesterday, the H.R. Training Specialist requested that I conduct a workshop next month on “Negotiation Strategies for Women.” From my work in developing the Women’s Leadership Program and our discussions on the unique challenges and strategies for women in negotiations, she believes I’m the right man for the job. But that’s the problem.

I don’t want to mansplain how women should behave in order to get what they want. If men and women dismiss women for deploying the same negotiation strategies that men use, then we need better Title IX training, not to correct women’s negotiation strategies.

Unfortunately, a Title IX training session wouldn’t work. We’d need a Title IX immersion program. Developing equitable interpretive frames would require constant reevaluation of blind-spot preconceptions. This questioning process has to occur within sustained, in-depth collaborative learning engagements with people of different perspectives — and in high-trust environments. Since interpretive frames shape one’s own identity, the process reforms the self. It’s emotionally exhausting. It’s painful. Not many people want to go through that process, especially not for what, on a first glance, appears to benefit only others. Far more commonly, people reach for low-hanging skills, or at least skills that clearly benefit themselves.

And that brings us back to where we are: a man conducting a workshop for women on how to work within a male system.

Don’t get me wrong. Instead of presenting bullet-point slides on research, I will shift both the attention and source of knowledge to the participants. I will use research not to lecture, but rather to ask targeted questions. In other words, I can downplay or even somewhat undermine the structural parallel with the social problem.

But I’ll still be a man conducting a workshop for women on how to work within a male system.

Participants in the Faculty Leadership Program sacrifice 1/5 of their work week for an entire semester. This sacrifice not only impacts their time, but also their capacities. At least some participants discover a new normal in what they can achieve.

This semester, participants met with over thirty campus contributors from every university division. They explored the inner workings of Austin Peay, and then they focused their interviews. The faculty investigated a personal frustration that negatively impacts student success. They compared Austin Peay to peer institutions, met with stakeholders, and learned whether this frustration was a high enough priority for the university to dedicate resources to remedy. During that process, they discovered a few champions for their cause — people who behind the scenes not only supported their goal, but also looked for ways to help achieve it. Although this was a truly campus-led program, it was very much the participants’. To change even one of them would have changed everything about it. They’re proud of their accomplishment, and they should be. One faculty member claimed she felt transformed by the experience.

Not everyone in the program wants to enter into administration, but everyone leaves feeling empowered. Program alumni know enough about the institution and how it works to connect disparate parts of the university and make something happen. Even if they don’t take advantage of that superpower for their own ideas, they might connect others who otherwise lack the resources to see their ideas come to fruition.

In other words, these faculty members’ very presence makes this university stronger.